The bomb that kill’s you isn’t the one that you see, it’s the one that you don’t. I worked on an incredibly busy EOD team in Afghanistan. We would run multiple IEDs a day, often bouncing around our area of operations multiple times in a day. You get to learn the land pretty well after a while and gain an understanding of what enemy cells own what area. For example, If we went east, it was command-detonated IEDs. If we went south it was pressure plates. If we went north it was cell phones, etc. We had been to the same area multiple times for pressure plates, when we got a call about an unburied pressure plate on the road. Pretty uncommon, since the whole purpose is to hide the bomb from people so that they don’t see it. When we got on scene, we parked in a new area. I could see where we had parked a couple of days prior, next to a steep embankment. After spending sometime on the suspect device with the robot, I put on the bombsuit and went down range. The pressure plate on top of the road wasn’t connected to anything. We then investigated where we had parked a couple of days prior. Sure enough there was a large explosive charge in the ground…meant for me. I leaned a lot that day. Mainly that I was being watched and had to continue to change up what I was doing; which I did.